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You’ve likely heard that Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter… and that he is now trying to get out of buying Twitter… and that at first he wanted to defeat the bots on Twitter… but now he’s apparently surprised that there are lots of bots on Twitter. It's a spectacle made for the headlines, but it's also, at its core, a regular old corporate law dispute.

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek spoke with Adriana Robertson, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law at the University of Chicago Law School, to talk about the legal issues behind the headlines. What is the Delaware Court of Chancery in which Musk and Twitter are going to face off? Will it care at all about the bots? And how do corporate lawyers think and talk about this differently from how it gets talked about in most of the public conversation about it?


Jen Patja is the editor of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security, and serves as Lawfare’s Director of Audience Engagement. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics and Deputy Director of the Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier, where she worked to deepen public understanding of constitutional democracy and inspire meaningful civic participation.
Evelyn Douek is an Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School on the topic of private and public regulation of online speech. Prior to attending HLS, Evelyn was an Associate (clerk) to the Honourable Chief Justice Susan Kiefel of the High Court of Australia. She received her LL.B. from UNSW Sydney, where she was Executive Editor of the UNSW Law Journal.
Adriana Robertson is the Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
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